The Passenger

The thing in the deep interior hunted by signature, and that was the whole problem.

Gesbiek spent four days establishing it and did not enjoy any of them. It did not track by scent, which he could manage. It did not track by sound or sight or ground vibration, all of which he had spent a year learning to control. It read the mana displacement of a living thing across a distance of about two kilometres, and it did not care what the thing was standing behind.

Stone did not stop it. He tested that from inside a granite shelf with his own signature the only thing in the zone, and it came, unhurried, and put its head against the rock exactly where he was.

Freeze bought two seconds. Clip bought a second and a half. Neither bought a route past something that knew where he was at all times.

He needed it to be somewhere else.

He worked the problem for two more days and arrived at the answer he had been avoiding, which is generally how a person arrives at that kind of answer.

He needed a second signature. Something living, moving east while he moved west, loud enough to be worth crossing two kilometres for.

There was nothing in the deep interior small enough to possess and large enough to register.

* * * *

He found the goblin on the seventh day, on the wrong side of the boundary, working a trapline.

Gesbiek lay on a rock ledge and watched him for most of an afternoon, which was longer than the assessment required.

He was small. Not runt-small, but ordinary, the size Gesbiek had been in the spring and was no longer. A 1-Green shard in his chest, dim, the sort that meant a life of gathering rather than fighting. He had a bag over one shoulder, patched twice with different hides, and a bundle of snares he set with the unhurried competence of somebody who had set a great many snares.

He worked eleven traps. He rebaited seven and reset two and left two alone because whatever was in them was not worth the walk.

At the ninth he found something small and dead and made a satisfied noise and put it in the bag.

He hummed.

It was not a tune Gesbiek recognised. Four notes, repeating, the sort of thing a person hums when they are alone and have been alone for a while and have stopped noticing they are making a sound.

Gesbiek watched him hum and set snares and understood exactly what he was looking at.

Somebody's whole day. A trapline worked in an order that had been decided over seasons. A bag mended by somebody who intended to keep it. A person going about the business of a life, at the edge of a country that would kill him if he took eleven more steps east, who had presumably worked out precisely where those eleven steps began.

Gesbiek ran the plan.

Take the body. Walk it east at speed, loudly, for one kilometre. The signature-hunter crosses to intercept. Gesbiek's own body, meanwhile, moves west through the gap on foot and is through the interior before anything reconsiders.

Then release. The goblin wakes up a kilometre from his traps with a headache and no explanation, and walks home, and tells nobody, because who would he tell.

No harm done.

Gesbiek turned that phrase over and found that it held, in the way a thing holds when you do not put weight on it.

He put the reticle on the goblin's back.

[VALID TARGET: DENSITY < USER]
[RESISTANCE PROBABILITY: HIGH]

High. He had never seen high.

He took it anyway.

* * * *

The screaming had words in it.

That was the difference, and it arrived in the first instant, before the body had finished going rigid, before Gesbiek had sent a single instruction.

The rat had produced noise. Panic compressed into sound and pushed into the middle of his skull, and he had understood it as an animal's response to a wrong thing and had been able to hold it as data.

This had grammar.

*What. What. My hands. My hands are not. Who is. WHO IS IN HERE.*

Gesbiek nearly let go in the first two seconds.

He did not, because letting go meant starting again, and starting again meant the whole plan and another afternoon and the light was going.

He pushed the command through instead.

*Walk. East.*

The body did not walk. It fought him, with everything a lifetime of setting snares in rough country had built into it, and Gesbiek could feel the specific quality of the resistance, which was not an animal's blind refusal but a person's, aimed and intentional and understanding exactly what it was aimed at.

He put more into it.

The legs came up under themselves and the body began to walk east.

*No. No no no. That is not. Stop. STOP.*

"I am going to give it back," Gesbiek said, out loud, from a rock ledge two hundred feet away with his own eyes closed. "In ten minutes. I promise you that."

The goblin could not hear him. He knew that. He said it anyway, and noted, distantly, that he had needed to.

* * * *

He ran the body hard.

Eastward at a pace the legs were not built for, over ground that was rough and getting rougher, making as much noise as a body could make. He broke branches with it. He put it through undergrowth instead of round.

Behind him, at two kilometres, something enormous changed direction.

He felt the mana shift the way you feel a door open in another room. It had taken the bait. It was coming east.

*Please.*

The voice in the body had changed. It had gone through fury and out the other side into something worse.

*Please. I have a. There is somebody who. Please.*

Gesbiek pushed the legs harder.

*My name is Rill.*

He almost stopped.

It was not a plea. That was the thing he understood immediately and would go on understanding for the rest of his life. It was not asking for anything. A person locked in a room in his own skull with something else driving his body toward a noise in the trees had reached for the only thing he still owned and had put it down where the intruder would have to see it.

*I am Rill. I am Rill. I am Rill.*

Gesbiek ran him another two hundred metres and then stopped him, because the plan said one kilometre and one kilometre had been covered, and the west gap was open, and it was time to let go.

He reached for the release.

The trees came apart.

* * * *

It had not crossed the two kilometres.

It had been closer than his estimate, or it had moved faster than his estimate, or the estimate had been built on four days of watching a thing he did not understand. He would go over it many times and never be certain which.

The point was that it arrived while he was still in there.

Gesbiek felt the body register it. Not his own body, safe on a ledge with its eyes shut. This one, Rill's, with the lungs burning from a kilometre they had not consented to run and the legs shaking and the whole animal understanding, in the way animals understand, exactly what had come out of the trees.

*Oh.*

That was all. One syllable, in a room in a skull, and no fury in it at all.

Gesbiek tried to move the body. He got it half a step.

Then the thing in the deep interior did what it did, and Gesbiek was inside a body while it happened, and he stayed inside it because letting go took a decision and there was no time in which to make one.

He felt it end.

Not from outside. Not the way he had watched a rat go still or a beetle stop existing on a root. From the middle of it: the specific sensation of a self that was mid-sentence and did not finish, the enormous unhurried closing of something that had been running continuously since the day it started and had no procedure for stopping.

It went through him and did not stop at the edges of the body. It came up the tether.

Then he was on a rock ledge two hundred feet away, on his hands and knees, being violently sick.

* * * *

He got there in about four minutes, which was as fast as his legs would carry him.

There was very little left. He had known there would be. He got the bag, which had come off in the first second and was lying twenty feet from everything else, patched twice with different hides, with something small and dead inside it and eleven snares in a bundle.

He sat down beside it and opened his menu, because that was what he did with problems.

[REVIVAL]
[COST: 50% CURRENT MANA]
[RESTORES MOTOR FUNCTION TO TERMINATED ENTITIES]
[WARNING: DOES NOT RESTORE CONSCIOUSNESS]

He read the last line.

Then he read it again, and then a third time, and then he executed it anyway, because he had reached the part of the evening where a goblin does the thing he already knows will not work in order to be finished with hoping.

The silver went out of his chest and found what was there.

It stood up.

It stood the way things stand when the standing has been instructed rather than chosen: all at once, without the small preparatory shifts a living body makes, the weight arriving in the legs in the wrong order. It faced him. It waited.

Nobody in there.

No fury. No grammar. No four notes hummed by somebody who had stopped noticing he was making a sound. A frame with motor function restored, holding a posture, waiting for the next instruction from the only thing in the world currently able to give it one.

Gesbiek looked at it for a long time.

"I am sorry," he said.

It waited.

He released the tether and it went down in a heap, and he sat with his back against a rock while the light finished going.

* * * *

He buried what there was, because there was nothing else available to do and because doing nothing was not going to be survivable.

There was a stream forty metres north with a bed full of smooth stones, and he carried them up one at a time, and it did not occur to him until the eleventh trip that he had done this before, on the other side of the Darkwood, over the course of a week, when he was three feet tall and had not eaten in three days.

He put twenty on. Then he put more on, because twenty was the number he had used for a grandfather and it did not seem correct to use the same number here, and he could not have said why.

He put the bag underneath the stones with the snares still bundled inside it.

He said, out loud, to a cairn in the deep interior of a forest, "His name was Rill."

Then he sat down next to it, because there was nowhere he needed to be.

* * * *

It did not leave.

That was the part he understood over the following days, slowly, the way you understand an injury that has changed how a joint works.

Something had come up the tether while Rill was ending, and it had not passed through him and out the other side. It had lodged.

He noticed it first three days later, on a Yellow-tier lizard he killed without thinking about it, the sort of kill he had made a hundred times.

It ended, and he felt it end.

Not the impact. Not the resistance going out of the body under his hands. The other thing, small and clean and entirely unmistakable, arriving in the same place Rill's ending had arrived and using the same route.

He stopped and stood over a lizard with his hands full of its blood and understood that a door had been opened in him and that he did not have the closing of it.

Every kill after that. Every one. Small things registered as small things and he could work through them, and larger things sat in him for an hour or a day, and none of them were as large as Rill and all of them were the same shape.

He tested whether it could be shut off. It could not.

He tested whether it faded. It did not fade. It became ordinary, which was not the same as fading, and he thought about the difference quite often.

He had been given a great many things by the Silver Core in his chest. Speed, and sight, and a route through stone, and a stopped clock, and a currency exchange, and the ability to borrow bodies.

This was the first thing it had given him that he had not asked for and could not return.

* * * *

He went back to work a fortnight later, because there was nothing else, and because the Yellow country was still there and the interior was still full of things worth eating and Level 50 was a long way from a hundred.

He worked well. He worked better, in fact. Whatever the thing in him was doing, it did not slow his hands.

He used Possession again inside the month. Beetles, twice, for scouting.

He never once put the reticle on anything that had words in it, then or afterward, and he did not make a rule about it or write it down or say it out loud to an empty forest.

He simply did not do it, in the way that a person does not put a hand on a stove.

Nothing about the arrangement was a redemption and he did not pretend otherwise. He had needed a second signature, and he had taken one, and a goblin who had spent that morning rebaiting seven snares had died in a forest he had specifically arranged never to enter.

The cairn was two days east and Gesbiek did not go back to it.

He carried the four notes instead, which he had heard exactly once, from two hundred feet away, on a rock ledge, on an afternoon when the assessment had taken considerably longer than the assessment required.

He found himself humming them sometimes, later, at Level 60 and at Level 70 and in a throne room at Level 100, without noticing he had started.